Sunday, March 29, 2015

That I shall leave this world unsung is, truth to
tell, a blessing in disguise. Haven’t you noticed how Indian obit writers
unabashedly indulge themselves in flights of fancy and plumb the depth of obsequity – apart from vandalizing the
English language mercilessly − when it comes to doing their job without fear or
favour? (In their midst, not even a single Saadat Hasan Manto, eh?) Their
unspoken excuse is that hypocrisy as a tenet of (politically?) correct
behaviour is allegedly a part and parcel of Indian “culture”. It stipulates
that no evil shall be spoken of the dearly departed never mind even if the
truth has to be bent backwards or stood on its head as the situation requires.
Little white lies are to be preferred to the beam of white light the poor man
or woman may be facing in the hereafter.

Before you point your accusatory finger at me for
blithely following their exemplary example in titling this post, let me confess
to a weakness for children’s ditties (simple words, uncomplicated rhyming,
easy-to-memorize) over the more obfuscatingly worded verses of the
idiosyncratic 19th-century poet. Mind you, this worthy was shunned
by his envious and contemptuous contemporaries but posthumously hailed by
latter-day critics as no less than a mystical visionary of the Romantic Age. I
am thinking of the late and latterly lamented William Blake(1757-1827), Esquire, to wit.

To put the records straight, this
impudent versifier must have somehow got privy to the likelihood of his
impendingcanonization in the annals of literature in the not too
faraway future. To make sure it would come about, he cunningly decided to take
recourse to an imagined version of Peter Roget’s “classed catalogue of words …
of much use in literary composition” and launched his much celebrated poem,
“The Liar” (1810), with a double-barreled fusillade of synonymshttp://yhoo.it/1kFVsdE:

“Deceiver,
dissembler

Your trousers are alight

From what pole or gallows

Shall they dangle in the night?”

Ah,
the infinite riches of the English language! A word for every shade of meaning
yielding a surfeit of synonyms in most cases. But what we think is its strength
could well be harbouring the seeds of its weakness, making it an easy tool of
deceit when wielded by deceivers, dissemblers, fibbers, fabulists, perjurers,
fabricators, story tellers, tale weavers, poets, dissimulators, falsifiers, con
artists, deluders, imposters, false witnesses, fablers, misleaders,
equivocators, tricksters, conjurors, quacks, pretenders, swindlers,
statisticians and assorted liars of every ilk.

The
celebrated American humourist and author, Mark Twain (1835-1910), is credited
with this oft-quoted witticism: "There are three kinds of lies: lies,
damned lies and statistics." He,
however, modestly declined authorship and pointed the finger at Disraeli
(1804-1881). That itself turned out to be a posture. An essay on The University
of York website on a Department of Mathematics page http://bit.ly/1sh70cv dealing with the various
occurrences of “lies, damned …” avers, though not confidently, that its most
likely source was Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911), a Liberal MP of the
Victorian era, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in Gladstone's
second government and a Privy Council member whose extra-marital affairs ruined
his political career. The Dilke wordings differ slightly, though: “fibs, lies,
and statistics” in press reportage and “a fib, a lie, and statistics” in a
verbal citing. Can you tell the truth from the lie?

Dr
Samuel Johnson, the pioneer English lexicographer, once remarked:
"Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement." The two
swindlers in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” faithfully
followed that dictum to spread the word that they wove the finest cloth with
colours as delicate as the butterflies’ and the cloth itself as light as
gossamer with patterns beautiful and unusually intricate. Moreover, they
claimed a magical quality for their cloth: stupid or incompetent people could
not see it. The reigning Emperor who was quite a vain fob and nearly everyone else
in the kingdom was taken in by the “large promise”, i.e., the enormous lie.
Finally, it took a child’s innocence to pierce the veil of the falsehood.

Lying,
come to think of it, is more often than not a work-in-progress. Once you have
started your career as a liar, you have got to keep at it telling more lies to
cover up the original lie. A soap ad on the idiot box, for instance, makes the
claim that the product can deal the new strains of virus “ordinary” soaps
cannot tackle. To further enhance the credibility of this claim, accreditation
by a London organization connected with public health awarded for the brand’s
hygiene-education initiative about hand
washinghttp://bit.ly/1pGXL3r is touted as recognition
of its improved wide-spectrum anti-virus action against newer strains.

Equally
amusing are the truth-bending antics of toothpaste advertisers. Even if you
brush your teeth twice a day, I am reasonably certain you gargle away nearly every
trace of it from your mouth and teeth afterwards. So, unless the just brushed
toothpaste’s foam defies the force of the gargle and resolutely clings to the
teeth’s enamel or, better still, impregnates it and thus becomes a part of it,
how can anyone in his right mind − and his tongue not firmly tucked in his
cheek − claim with a straight face that the toothpaste keeps doing its good
work in your mouth for 12 hours?

All
this reminds me of Edgar Wallace’s Educated
Evans stories about the exploits of a racing tout in the early part of the
last century. Evans was apparently a character based on Wallace’s own
experience as a tout before he turned a journalist. This irrepressible
yarn-spinner laid claims to “inside information straight from the horse’s
mouth” about fixed races. Many of these scams were quite bizarre and hard to
believe unless you were a born victim.

“The
reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their
stories,” opined Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). When denied the attention, do
they resort to lies in order to get a hearing? From little white ones to big
black ones? The former are harmless diversions. The latter are motivated by
intent to deceive.

Rat: I have a large brain and it’s been
conclusively proven that those with larger brains are smarter than those with
smaller brains.

Goat: That’s not true.

Rat: Yes, it is.

Goat: How do you know?

Rat: Because something is true whenever
you say it has been conclusively proven.

Goat: That’s not how that works.

Rat: Hey, in an age where no one reads,
it’s how that works.

(I
don’t know about you but I agree with Rat about the power of “conclusively
proven”; I have recently seen it being used in a TV ad of a leading tea brand claiming to contain herbal ingredients capable
of keeping the tea drinker healthy and productive. The only evidence offered in
support of the claim is, yes, you got it right: “conclusively proven”.)

By
the way, if you did not like the above ending, I have another up my sleeve in the
illustrious tradition of the fabulous fibber, Groucho Marx.

A
priest and a rabbi along with a pair of flaming panties (oops, pants) walked
into a bar… Still don’t like it? Too bad, bud.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

What
is rape? The word derives most likely from the 14th century Middle English
rapen out of the Anglo-French raper from the Latin rapere meaning “to seize, carry off by
force, plunder”. http://bit.ly/1MZpGV7 Culturally
viewed, it is an atavistic act harking back to the male chauvinistic, patriarchal,
feudalistic past. The Latin word atavus refers
to the great-great-great-grandfather or an ancestor. For the victim, rape is
existentially disruptive. For the perpetrator, rape is more often than not a
crime of opportunity. Ergo,
unpredictable and impossible to anticipate and prevent. Equally, it is a crime
that requires the existence of a special kind of mindset in the perpetrator who
may hail from any caste, class, region and religion, often from among the close
acquaintances of the victim. Mind mapping of a potential rapist would reveal, I
suspect, the existence of a patriarchal, fedudalistic terrain wherein the power
equation is forever set against women. To the rapist, women are vassals in
perpetuity. Men are the all-powerful lords and masters entitled to all kinds of
privileges as well as access to every conceivable resource including the
vassals’ bodies. The by now widely publicized views of many authority figures
as well as the rapist in the Nirbhaya case lend credence to this contention.

This
set of core “tenets” is not documented but informally passed on from generation
to generation. So strong is their stranglehold on Indians that even some of the
womenfolk willingly and readily assist their “betters” in enforcing them. This
is abundantly evident by their inclusion in the perpetrators’ line-up in dowry
and honour killings. Even village elders, gotra
(clan)-inspired khap panchayats and
similar formal or informal tribal networks willingly join such woman-hating
initiatives. One is often led to wonder if the paternalistic underpinnings of
most religions like Vedantism/Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity do not
make them the ideal breeding grounds for the rapist as well as the terrorist
mindsets.

In
the sexually vitiated Indian context, the subtext of dowry reads like this in
the warped male mind: I’m taking “the burden” off your hands. So, pay up whatever
I ask for and shut up. Of the resistance to widow remarriage: I have no use for
“used goods”. (Objectification of women is routinely implicit in all misogynous
behaviour and thinking. Even in the “civilized” Occident, only wives are
swapped, never husbands, remember?) Of “provocative” dressing and behaviour by
women: Take me. I am available.

Have
you noticed the oft-recurring visual tableaux in most dances performed by
couples? The male dancer supports his female partner with his arm wrapped
around her waist, his face looming over hers and she is arching backward as far
as she can as if to keep as much distance between the two as possible. Male
superiority/male dominance is written all over this image – just as it is in
the iconic RK Films logo − even when the choreography is orchestrated by a
woman. By so doing, is she (the female dancer): (a) accepting her inferior
status in the relationship or (b) repelling the male’s advances (a crypto-rape
scenario)?

Then,
there is the all-time classic, time-honoured “Krishna Leela” defence and/or
ratiocination, based on a myth deeply embedded in the Indian consciousness,
which nobody seems to question or object to. Krishna, the legendary lover with
reportedly 16108 wives (none of them won by relentless ragging, though),
well-known for his playful and innocent antics as a child of hiding the clothes of bathing gopis, teasing them to distraction and taking advantage of their affection
to rob them of butter, is heralded as the beacon of how a young man should woo
a young woman of his fancy, i.e., the one who currently triggers an upsurge of
testosterone in him. The “boys will be boys” justification is used with
impunity, time and again, to condone disrespectful treatment of women by “manly”
men. In the fifties and sixties, there was a spate of Hindi movies featuring
Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor, Shashi Kapoor and even Joy Mukerjee – the poor girl’s
Shammi Kapoor − emulating this “Krishna” school of how to woo a girl and not compromise
your machismo. This sort of depiction of the male-female equation continues to
exist in one form or another in movies and on the idiot box even now.

Much
as I would like to take an optimistic view of the situation, no way out of this
well-entrenched psycho-socio-cultural impasse seems to exist in my opinion. Legal
and/or extra-legal (e.g., lynching and, on the milder side, protests march,
candle light processions, advertising to persuade the would-be rapist to shed
his sinful ways) solutions cannot achieve the desired result. The only way to
do it is to change for the better the existing attitude and belief super structure
of India. And that, as the dashing, debonair Don would have so eloquently put
it, is not only difficult but impossible (= “mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai”).

Friday, March 20, 2015

Some days,
it’s best to stay in bed. Friday, 20 March (not 13,mind you, but the
unpropitious New Moon Day nonetheless) was one of them. In the morning, the
horrendously expensive family fish tank sprung a leak and had to be put to
pasture. Not taking a hint from the admonitory turn of events, I ventured to
send an email to Seth Godin asking for his help to get my novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, published. It
went out smack at 3 p.m. and read as follows:

Sub: The
Last Gandhi Movie: Have I invented the Nuvel?

Dear Mr
Godin:

Addressing
you as “Dear Seth”, I presume, would perhaps be a tad impertinent. The story
I’m about to tell is far from, though.

At
the end of the 20th century, I bought a book on impulse. How to Mutate and Take Over the World
(Ballantine, 1996) by a pair of pseudonymous authors was subtitled “An Exploded
Post Novel”. An Amazon reader review (05-01-2002) describes it as “… a mix of
email between the two authors, interspersed with email to their publisher, news
stories, book reviews (yes, reviews for a book in the book they review, and
very poor ones too!), and interviews. We are left no knowledge of what is real,
fake or somewhere in between.”

Around
that time, I also wrote a novel, The Last
Gandhi Movie, but did not work hard to marketit except making a rather interesting website (The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire). Unfortunately, the company that made
it closed down and I have only a CD of the website with partial contents. It is
also still there on the Wayback Machine, in bits and pieces but not really
enough of it.By the way, The Last Gandhi Movie shares two devices
of storytelling with How to Mutate and
Take Over the World: [1] book reviews and [2] author interview by a hostile
critic.

In
November 2014, I decided to revive The
Last Gandhi Movie. It had suddenly dawned on me that it would work better as
a novel if there were a counterpoint added to the main text. There are three
narrative strands in the now marginally revised main text: (1) Gandhi, (2) movies
and (3) the life and exploits of the nameless narrator. I wrote The Last Gandhi Movie with the digitally
inclined reader in mind: very short attention span, familiarity with and
fondness for clipped email/sms/twitter style of writing, impatience with
over-sentimental plotting. The counterpoint I added to the earlier text in
November-December 2014 is a literary innovation of sorts (“RetroNotes”). Some may dismiss the RetroNotes as the writer’s “after-thoughts”
and/or his attempt to pre-empt the critics. Others may see their role in adding
valuable clues of historical, socio-cultural and psychological context to the
story telling. At times, the RetroNotes act as the proverbial Devil’s Advocate
adding a dash of contrarian pungency to the narrative. At others, they work as
an alienation device. By accident, I may have “invented the Nuvel”.

But why am I eschewing the regular
publishing route? Mainly because I see more and more publishers abandoning
literary fiction for bestsellers and have closed minds to experimental fiction especially. Maybe, I could go
with Kickstarter. But my guess is: it
works best only for a celebrity writer.

To
give The Last Gandhi Movie a viral
shot in the arm and also to test reader reaction, I am planning to upload it to
https://www.academia.edu. This website has 18,581,427 academically inclined
members and attracts over 15.7 million unique visitors a month according to the
‘About’ page. Among them, quite a few are interested in Gandhian and related
studies.This may even help me to
find a publisher.

The only
time you cited Gandhi was in Tribes: We
Need You to Lead Us: “There's no record of Martin Luther King, Jr. or
Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn't the point. Change is.”

The Last Gandhi Movieis about changing
the way novels are supposed to be written. Perhaps, as a best-selling author,
speaker and agent of change, you may vouchsafe to help
publish a path-breaking literary innovation. I am aware that you do not do any
coaching, investing or consulting. So why should you make an exception in my
case? Having sensed your entrepreneurial zeal and curiosity about anything new from
your writings, I think just maybe you’ll do it. If not, at least pitch in a few
suggestions on how to go about it.

I’ve not attached the text of my “magnum opus” to this email. I would do
so only after you give me the permission to send it.

Do I have your permission?

Meanwhile, many thanks for reading the email. I know fully well I cannot
rule out the worst-case scenario. You may say No, thank you. Well, Sir, I am
ready to take it on my 78 year-old chin. And, grin.

Warm regards,

Sincerely,

Deepak Mankar

At 3:54 p.m., Mr Godin wrote back:

[T]hank you
Deepak, for the thoughtful note and for the work you do

I’m afraid
that I can’t possibly do your work justice. I’m totally swamped.

Good luck
with all of it, sir.

Seth

I read the
reply about half an hour later and expressed my gratitude at 4:31 p.m. thus:

Thanks, Mr
Godin. You are prompt and forthright. I appreciate it. Thanks again and
regards,

Deepak
Mankar

There the
matter rests. As I was saying earlier, some days it’s best to stay in bed.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Is
there such a thing as the “perfect memoir”? Search me. That nothing of that ilk
has probably ever been extant dawned on me only when I started thinking about
writing one about my parents, Aai (c.
1897 - 1962) and Baba (c. 1880 -
1965). Unfortunately, much too late in my life did I come to realize that their
lives were worth being scrutinized with curiosity and recorded with love and
understanding by their son.

Reader
warned. Doing it has been far from simple, though. Their past before my birth had
been more or less a closed book to me. I had never tried to steal even a
glimpse of it. So I had to make do with half-remembered hearsay and third-party
“testimony” heard or overheard on various occasions and filed away for future
use, as it were. Being human makes my memory as fallible and untrustworthy as
the next person’s. Also, all along, I have been accustomed to view life through
the prism of accumulated prejudices and assumptions acquired over the decades.
Much as I may try to shed them, I can never be sure they aren’t there at a
given moment. So what you will read here is the story of Mr Waman Keshavji
Mankar, Esq., and his lawfully wedded spouse, Laxmibai (née Manak Ajinkya), the
original Mankar couple of 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://bit.ly/1fcggIG – as far as I could assemble
the mosaic of lost time though undoubtedly not without flaws. Readers will also
have to pardon me for sounding embittered and deeply resentful when I refer to
some of the people featuring in the tale and their vile deeds. That is how I
feel about what happened. Hypocrisy and I never had even a nodding acquaintance.
That’s a fact plain and simple − neither hubris nor a boast.

Name
decodified. Before we go any further, I have a theory about the origin of our family
name although I cannot lay a claim to the expertise of an etymologist or a polyglot.
The “Man” (or the phonetic “Maan”) part of the word “Mankar”, I dare say, might
have come from the Marathi word “Maan” (= status, privilege, right) used in a
community-centric context. The surname “Mankar” might have thus alluded to a
clan who had status in the community and enjoyed certain privileges owing to
it. W.E. Gladstone Solomon, art historian, though, had a slightly different
take on the surname mentioned in his study, The
Charm of Indian Art; “Mankar”, he averred, signified “the noble one”. http://tinyurl.com/3fnunj Fair enough.

Sad but
true.
There were at least three occasions when I saw and/or heard my father crying.
The first one was sometime in 1944 or 1945 when I was 8 or 9 years old lying in
bed in the dead of night and trying not to hear his stifled sobs. The incidence
is described at http://bit.ly/1rHygza. The trigger was my
sister’s avowal to marry a Muslim colleague apparently and her consequent and
sudden disappearance from 233 Khetwadi Main Road one Saturday afternoon. (Later,
her elder daughter revealed that her mother had in fact been spurned by her
alleged boy friend.) The second time I saw Baba sobbing was when he came home after
work one sad evening in 1962 and learned that Aai, his by-then estranged wife,
had succumbed to her lingering ailment (leukemia) in the Bombay Hospital. The
third occasion in 1965 – a short while before his death − was described to me
by Ujwal. Baba, as was his wont, was entertaining his elder grandson. Ashu was
perched precariously on the edge of the dining table and laughing his head off
at his grandfather’s antics as he enacted a funny tale. While thus occupied, he
fell off and crashed to the floor. He was a bit stunned but otherwise quite
okay while Baba had by then freaked out and was sobbing uncontrollably. It took
all of Ujwal’s persuasive skill to calm him down and convince him that all was
well. He had great rapport with Ashu and Abhi, then toddlers, as well as their
mother. He used to rock his grandsons on his haunches and sing to them ditties
of his own making, much to their unmitigated delight. http://bit.ly/1mWMagg He was also responsible,
after Aai’s death, for freeing Ujwal from her self-imposed dress code of
wearing only sarees in deference to Aai’s wishes. He told her to wear what she
felt comfortable in while working and in daily living.

Equanimity
personified. My reason to start this memoir with the sad memories was to
highlight the fact that Baba’s everyday essential mental state (sthayi bhava) was one of equanimity. He
must have come to this mental plateau over time, I gather, dealing with the
many problems life kept hurling at him. In my childhood, I don’t remember Baba
ever raising his voice at any of us. Even his infrequent reprimands and
admonitions for my childish transgressions were administered in a gentle,
slightly pained tone of voice. This is perhaps why he was unable to discipline
his wayward daughter well in time. At times, a raised voice gets better results
than a raised palm. He chose to raise neither.

Details,
details, details. When he breathed his last in 1965, a little after I had
joined Clarion-McCann http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ, Baba was 85 by his own
reckoning, give or take. So, it is my conjecture that he must have been born circa 1880. That’s 7 years before
Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) was built and 17 years
before the first automobile reached the Indian shores (barely three years after
its invention in the US of A). I don’t know anything about Baba’s father except
his name (Keshavji). Keshav is one of Lord Vishnu’s names, occurring at the 23rd
and 648th rank in Vishnu Sahastranama
(the thousand names of Vishnu recited in his praise), by the way. The Mankar
family, hearsay informed me, lived in Navi Wadi, a then predominantly Pathare
Prabhu precinct in South Bombay, http://bit.ly/1oG4HJn in near-indigent
circumstances. Navi Wadi is also where the Mankar Family deity, Maheshwari,
resides.

The way the
Prabhus dressed, worked, thought and lived. In Chapter 6 of Madame Helena
Patrovna Blavatsky's From the Caves
and Jungles of Hindostan (1879-80)http://tinyurl.com/5l3zb7, she wrote about how the then current
generation of the Pathare Prabhus was living "by their pens", which
is to say "occupying all the small Government posts in the Bombay
Presidency, and so being dangerous rivals of the Bengali Babus since the time
of British rule. In Bombay, the Patan clerks reach the considerable figure of
five thousand. Their complexion is darker than the complexion of Konkan
Brahmans, but they are handsomer and brighter." In Mary Fainsod
Katzenstein’s Ethnicity and Equality
(Cornell University Press, New York, 1979, p.44), she cites Edwardes’ especial
reference in The Gazetteer of Bombay
(Vol. I, p.168) to the fact that “although up to about 1870, the dress of the
Prabhus was considered model attire, the once wealthy Prabhu families soon
began to desert their large Bombay residences for more simple, economical
flats”. She also points out that in those days the Pathare Prabhus occupied
“key administrative and clerical positions in Bombay under the British”.

Here’s
what Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar wrote in Annihilation
of Caste with a Reply to Mahatma Gandhi (Navayana, 2014, p.252) about
the Pathare Prabhu's abandoning their custom of widows remarrying (i.e., moving
from a progressive to a regressive stance): "At one time the Pathare
Prabhus had widow remarriage as a custom of their caste. This custom of widow remarriage
was later on looked upon as a mark of social inferiority by some members of the
caste, especially because it was contrary to the custom prevalent among the
Brahmins. With the object of raising status of their community some Pathare
Prabhus sought to stop this practice of widow remarriage that was prevalent in
their caste. The community was divided into two camps, one for and the other
against the innovation. The Peshwas took the side of those in favour of widow remarriage
and thus virtually prohibited the Pathare Prabhus from following the ways of
the Brahmins."

The
one somewhat eccentric trait of the Pathare Prabhus mentioned by W E Gladstone
Solomon http://tinyurl.com/3fnunj (p.49), the
composing and singing of epithalamiums during the marriage ceremony, is
something I can personally vouch for. Written in flowery and hagiographic
Marathi, I have heard them over the decades at several weddings, even fairly
recent ones, sung to the tune of the mangalashtakas (mantras
solemnizing the nuptials).

Among
the many talented Pathare Prabhus of those days was Bhujangrao Mankar who was
thought of as Sir Isaac Pitman’s Indian reincarnation in his role as the
“father” of Marathi and Gujarati shorthand. By the way, the writer of one of
the earlier Marathi sangeet natak
(musical play), Naladamayanti (1879),
was a Pathare Prabhu, Sokar Bapuji Trilokekar (1835-1908). http://bit.ly/149Oaci Also, the second lead pair in the
popular musical stage hit, Sangeet
Sanshaya Kallol (= a pandemonium of suspicion), premiered c.1916, was named Phalgunrao and Kritika
Trilokekar, apparently a Pathare Prabhu couple.

Baba’s
struggles continued. Baba managed to somehow complete his higher education
probably with help from well-wishers and scholarships. He passed both his
Master of Arts as well as Bachelor of Laws examinations. Then, true to his
predilection as a deep-dyed Pathare Prabhu, he entered into the service of the
Government of Bombay Presidency as a Public Prosecutor. He retired from his
post of Presidency Magistrate, Girgaum Police Court, situated very close to 233
Khetwadi Main Road, sometime in 1936. (Later, in the 1950s, he once again
worked for the Government as the Coroner of Bombay.)

Married to
Manak.
Along the way, at the age of 37 or so, he married Aai, then 20, probably in
1917. They had their first offspring in 1918, Malini, a daughter. The last of
their progeny was me born eighteen years later. In between, there was a son who
did not survive. Had he managed to do so, chances are I would not be around to
tell you this tale. (According to what Ujwal was told by her mother, Aai wanted
her obstetrician friend to terminate her last pregnancy but was dissuaded from
taking the drastic step.)

Self-evolved. Aai belonged to the
Ajinkya family residing on the ground floor of the house opposite the Roxy
Cinema where I was born. http://bit.ly/1yBaVUz My four distinct
childhood memories about this spacious ground-floor flat are: (1) a wooden
swing the exact replica of the one we had in our 233 Khetwadi Main Road
residence; (2) a living room practically bereft of books; (3) a Bombay Gas
connection for cooking fuel (coal gas that used to be manufactured till the late
seventies/early eighties in a Parel plant) in the kitchen just like the one
Ujwal’s parents had; and (4) a faint odour of residual decay wafting around the
back of the house. You can read whatever little I know about Aai’s family here:
http://bit.ly/1uhm2Ol Aai’s elder brother brought
her up. I remember him as a fair and handsome man with well-maintained salt-and-pepper
mustaches. He seemed to live well after having retired from the French Bank at
the end of a long and lucrative career. I remember him giving Aai a gold guinea
coin one bhai dooj. I used to visit
him mostly in Aai’s company but on a couple of occasions even Baba’s. (I don’t
remember Baba ever calling on Aai’s other brother who lived with his family at
Gamdevi.) Aai had, I heard her tell,
matriculated from the Kamalabai Girls’ School in Nowroji Street where Ujwal’s
mother http://bit.ly/1sQ0v0F was her classmate. Aai was small-built. One of my earliest infantile memories of her is being patted and cooed to sleep while I furiously sucked at my lower lip and kneaded a black wart situated at a respectful distance to the left of her belly button. I can vouch for the fact that, throughout my childhood, I watched her cultivating of her own volition an
interest in reading light literary fiction in Marathi as well as in watching quality
plays. She used to subscribe to three leading monthlies published in Marathi: Kirloskar, Stree and Manohar and
avidly read them cover to cover. I also remember accompanying her in April 1943 or 1944 to a
ten-night open-air festival of Marathi plays. It took place on the sea-facing ground
parallel to the BBCI (now Western) Railway tracks between the Grand Medical
College and Islam Gymkhanas on Marine Drive – a once-in-a-lifetime event staged
by the Marathi Sahitya Sangh with a view to revive the Marathi theatre. http://bit.ly/1rI3959 Aai also used to take me to Marathi
plays staged in nearby theatres. You wouldn’t be wrong in concluding that she
was a patron of the arts, albeit on a very modest scale. Maybe, it was due to
her culturally-charged Pathare Prabhu genes, who knows? I must confess,
however, that she played a big role in nurturing my love for reading and the
fine arts in general by setting an example. I used to be a major contributor to
a hand-written (hasta likhit)
magazine in Marathi produced by the sixth and seventh grade students in my
first school. http://bit.ly/1rZD4zY Her daughter did not
share her passion for the arts and literature unfortunately. Her reading was
confined to the popular English glossies she borrowed from a circulating
library with a home delivery service. Besides this, she was an ardent Hindi
movie addict regularly watching the banal romantic fare on offer without fail
at the various neighbourhood cinema halls and buying the musical discs. She
also had a formidable collection of Hindi movie program bills and song books
that used to be sold in the movie halls of the time – worth a fortune in the
memorabilia market today by the way. Unfortunately, it got lost owing to
neglect and lack of foresight.

The Mankars
do well for themselves. Aai’s maiden name “Manak” (or “Manik”) is the Marathi word
for ruby, a much-coveted precious stone coloured pink to blood-red. (Ujwal’s
mother, Aai’s close friend and confidante, kept addressing her by that name
even in later life.) After marriage she was, according to the custom
re-christened “Laxmi” after the Hindu Goddess of Prosperity and Wealth. She
seemed to live up to her new name as she entered Baba’s life. He prospered in
Government service and made enough money and more to support his cousins and
nephews and nieces, all part of his extended family. Also, following his
Pathare Prabhu predilection once again, he built a house for his family in
Prabhu Nagar, Khar, a Western suburb just beyond Bandra served by the BBCI (now
Western) Railways, where a lot of Pathare Prabhus were already shifting. My
guess is that he must have done it with his own savings because I doubt if bank
loans for housing were then offered as freely and avidly as at present. All
this must have added to his stature both in his professional and personal life.
As usual, life had to add an ironical twist in the story. Baba was named after
Waman, the fifth reincarnation of Lord Vishnu, a diminutive hero with a
generous heart who vanquished King Bali, the ruler of the three worlds. http://bit.ly/1xNCVmJ and http://bit.ly/ZLWKwH In fact, he stood tall at
5’-8” or so. No doubt, the commonality between him and his fabled namesake was
only in deeds.

Enemy
within. Unfortunately though not unexpectedly, there lurked among Baba’s near
and dear relatives – the very ones he had sheltered munificently − a bunch of
wily demons akin to the rakshasas
from his namesake’s universe. A maternal uncle and his family laid a squatter’s
claim to his Khar bunglow because he had allowed them to reside there. The
sentimental fool that he was, Baba chose to let go of the property quietly
instead of proving ownership in a court of law. (Come to think of it, although law
was his profession, I had heard him on several occasions advising people to
shun the courts and the lawyers.) He, however, broke off all ties with that
branch of his family except for a distant cousin of his (Sunder Nayak,
nicknamed Kanikaka) who worked for the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (now HSBC) and who,
along with his wife (known to me only as “Kaku” = aunty), was devoted to both
Aai and Baba. In fact, so close was the couple to my parents that the weddings
of two of their three daughters took place at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. What’s
more, when my cousin Suresh, the son of Kanikaka and Kaku, chose to marry a
non-Prabhu girl, my parents sided with his parents who were staunchly against
the marriage in spite of the fact that they were very fond of and close to their
nephew (he called Baba "bhaukaka" which literally means "bother uncle" and Aai, "Kakibai") and broad-minded enough to realize that the days of scrupulously staying
within the caste boundaries were numbered at least in the urban areas.

The wards’
fate. In
Aai and Baba’s charge and under their care, besides their own daughter, were
two of Baba’s nieces, Nalini and Sarojani, who respectfully addressed them with
the honorifics ‘Kakibai’ and ‘Kakaji’. Both of them, as far as my recollection
goes, were treated by my parents as daughters of the family on a par with the
real daughter – although the latter saw the situation in a different light and
took every opportunity to display her displeasure. Of the two wards, Nalini was
the more gifted academically. She completed her graduation from the Elphinstone
College along with her cousin who too excelled in academics. Unfortunately,
Nalini was married off in 1939 or thereabouts to a Rationing Office employee –
much below her intellectual stature − and ended up as a forlorn housewife. Even
after sixty years of a futile existence, her mind had lost none of its original
sharpness, though. In a get-together in the mid-nineties at Ashu’s in-laws, we
were astonished to hear her conversing fluently in French with a youngster from
France who happened to be one of the invitees. Nalini, I think, was also a
trained dilruba player though I don’t
remember ever hearing her playing it. Her less talented and plain-looking
sibling, Sarojani, took lessons in singing and sewing but did not seem to have
got anywhere in either field. She was married to a decent enough though far
from successful man at the same time as her sister.

Down with
the Khetwadi Mankars. Hindsight tells me that the real tragedy of Nalini was that
she was married off willy-nilly into a large joint family headed by a matriarch
with five sons living on the Antop Hill, Wadala. Nalini’s husband was the
youngest of the brood. The wife of the second eldest son, a moderately
successful lawyer by profession, was the eldest daughter of Aai’s elder brother
residing opposite the Roxy Cinema (please see above). (The Elder Ajinkya’s
progeny comprised one son and two daughters.) This worthy – the great pretender
that she was – professed profound love and affection for Aai in her presence while
secretly envying her good fortune and good life and, more particularly, the
success of her husband and, in consequence, despising her and the Mankar family
in the bargain and being always on the lookout for a chance to “fix” the
accursed lot. She was not alone in this pursuit. Her own husband, her sister
(much better educated than her but her match, stride for stride, as far as
skullduggery went) and the latter’s solicitor husband – a doppelganger of Justice
Strauss from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of
Unfortunate Events saga in terms of his deeds and thoughts − as well as
Aai’s own younger sister and the wife and the elder son of Aai’s second brother
(actually third, I think – the second one, an Indian Army physician, having migrated
to England during World War I) were all a part of the secret
down-with-the-Khetwadi-Mankars clique. The scenario happened to be no less
sudsy than the convoluted soaps currently doing the rounds in assorted Indian
languages on the idiot box.

Self-deluded. My poor, innocent,
trusting Aai played into the hands of the villains without fail on several
occasions, the only exception being her firm and unshakable resolve to have
Ujwal as her daughter-in-law. In Nalini’s case, she deluded herself into believing
that her niece would protect her own ward in the virtual snake pit she was
being shoved into – relying on her blind faith in people on her own maternal
side (= maaher in Marathi; mahike in Hindi). As the saying goes,
there’s no delusion more lethal than self-delusion. My mother must have
realized later on that she had made a grave mistake in Nalini’s case. Yet, she
repeated it toward the end of her life. The elder son of her third brother had
been caught red-handed in the commission of graft at the Airport in the late
fifties. Again deluding herself into believing in his innocence when his
propensity to take bribe was more or less an open secret – the big bunglow he
had built in West Bandra was cited by many as a pointer to his not-so-clean
hands – she insisted that Baba should “save” him through his many
“connections”. He, being the way he was, flatly refused. One thing led to
another and they drifted apart, stopped talking to each other. This wall of
silence remained in place right till her death in 1962. The
down-with-the-Khetwadi-Mankars clique had drawn blood twice over!

Two
weddings, a nagging worry and a misadventure. But that was far away in the future.
Coming back to the aftermath of the weddings of the two wards of Aai and Baba,
they were relieved to have done their duty in
loco parentis, i.e., as foster parents, by arranging what they considered
as a suitable match for each of the duo in (I guess) 1941 when I had just
turned five and we were then living on the first floor of 233 Khetwadi Main Road.
The lavish weddings were held in the spacious hall on the ground floor of
Vanita Vishram School next door to 233 Khetwadi Main Road and the reception in
the garden behind it. The school, by the way, is still very much there doing
its job although there are no more weddings held on the premises, as far as I
can tell.

Meanwhile,
frenzied, near frenetic efforts were afoot to find a suitable boy for the
daughter of the house. After all, she was not growing any younger with each
passing day. Alas, all to no avail. She had by then taken up a job in the newly
opened Rationing Office situated in the Jinnah Hall next to the Grant Road
Bridge within walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road. This is where she
found her “true love” in the Hindi film style and I have already described at
the beginning of this piece what happened then. To keep herself occupied after
her misadventure, Malini had learned Hindi and Urdu and started doing honorary
social service by tutoring women in a women’s organization in the vicinity. It
was only in 1949 that a match was finally arranged for the Princess. Prince
Charming happened to be no other than a Lower Division Clerk in the Income Tax
Department who happened to reside quite close by. A harmless enough person who
fancied himself as an artist; he used to make miniature statuettes out of clay
and paint them quite beautifully. He was also an amateur inventor in his own
right. I remember being impressed with his system of closing the front door
from the outside with the use of nothing but a piece of strong string. (To get
the door to open later, though, you had to ring the doorbell.) Malini had fared
maybe a notch better in the marriage stakes than Nalini, the more talented
cousin she despised and whose husband was not as gifted.

Pooja,
priests and a guru. Were Aai and Baba seeking their respective paths to salvation
in their own way? Aai had always been a god-fearing person given to daily
prayer, weekly pooja by thefamily priest on Mondays, fasting
during the month of Shravan, special offerings
to Lord Shiva such as maharudra with
eleven Brahmins presiding if so advised by the family priest or her astrologer,
a visit to a dozen Rama temples on the Ramnavmi
day and so forth. After her daughter’s “narrow escape from a fate worse than
death” (as she put it), she had acquired a guru
residing in a quaint sea-facing flat on the road along the coast leading up to
the Banganga and then on to the
Malabar Hills garden. And who do you think had led this guileless woman up this
particular garden path? No surprises there. It was someone from the
fix-The-Mankars clique: her younger sister-in-law whom she adored as a notable member
of her maternal family.

Marx,
Radical Humanism, Bhakti. While all this was happening, my father had taken to
reading, along with his client briefs and legal reference volumes (he had
several shelves full of these tomes stacked in his makeshift home office under
a shed on the front terrace of the third-floor flat – where we had shifted by
then − at 233 Khetwadi Main Road because his criminal law practice was
thriving, thank you), MN Roy’s books about radical humanism, books about
communist thought and leaders and biographies of the saints in the bhakti tradition in Marathi (Tukaram,
Namdeo, Muktabai, Chokha Mela, Janabai and the like). He had also started to
chant aloud Kabir’s doha, Tukaram’s abhang and Ramdas’s Manache Shloka in his leisure time. By the time India became free,
he had become a near ardent fan of Nehru tracking his idol’s doings faithfully
through The Times of India reportage every morning. (Did his reading leftist
literature have anything to do with it? By the way, I have a sneaking suspicion
that, when his idol shuffled off his mortal coil on 27 May 1964, Baba shed a
tear privately.) By contrast, I saw Aai mildly excited during the Samyukta
Maharashtra movement. By the time, it ended with the formation of the new state
in 1960, her health had started failing and her interest had all but tapered
off. Aai and Baba’s first grandchild, Shubhada, was born in 1950, by the way,
the second following ten years later.

Real
affliction, “false” physician. During most part of his active life as a government
servant and as a successful lawyer, Baba had been a victim of a strange malady
for which no doctor found either the right name or an effective treatment. From
time to time, he would wake up in the morning with a rash of hives all over his
upper torso and arms and a shooting pain mainly in his arms which made him cry
out and confined him to bed for a couple of days. The cretin of a family
physician under whose care he had put himself during the forties and the early
part of the fifties (that simpering abomination called himself either Dharadhar
or Dhurandhar – he too was a Pathare Prabhu, an unwelcome appendage hailing
from Baba’s early life in Navi Wadi, alas! − and lurked in a first floor flat
in the building on the corner of Burroughs Lane off Girgaum Road, if memory
serves) christened the condition “urticaria” and ordered his patient first to
eschew eggs, flesh and fish in his daily diet and then to get all his teeth
pulled out. Nothing worked. As he aged, however, the condition and the joke of
a doctor gradually waned out of his life. For as long as I knew him, Baba had
also suffered from hernia for which he used a support belt made by N Powell &
Company (Opera House).

Honour? What
honour? As the forties gave way to the fifties, my father was offered out of the
blue the post of Coroner of Bombay. Without giving a thought to the likelihood
that it would be an avoidable disruption in his fledgling but thriving career
as a widely sought-out criminal lawyer, he accepted with alacrity what he
thought of as an “honour”. (Those were the days when honour scored over everything
else in most people’s calculations.) Honour it certainly was along with a puny
honorarium which made a serious dent in Baba’s already unsound and untenable finances.
There was another unexpected setback, too. In a no-holds-barred judgment on one
of the cases he had to administer, the new but politically inept Coroner of
Bombay passed strictures on the admission procedure of accident victims then
prevalent in Sir Harkisondas Narottamdas Hospital. The Hospital had by then
acquired the ownership of 233 Khetwadi Main Road which more or less abutted
their own campus. Baba’s strictures so incensed the Trustees of the Hospital
that they vowed to “fix the ghati
Coroner once and for all”. Their very first offensive was to shift the
hospital’s morgue to the store room at the rear on the ground floor of 233
Khetwadi Main Road. This meant that many a funeral procession guest-featuring
loudly wailing and chest-pounding hired mourners originated from the front gate
of our building.

Kashmir
works its magic. I passed my Secondary School Certificate examination in 1952
and enrolled in the Sydenham College for the Bachelor of Commerce course. After
appearing for the Intermediate examination in April 1954, I went on a packaged
tour of Jammu and Kashmir. There were only two tourists on this tour apart from
me: Ujwal and Saroj or “Tamma”, Kanikaka’s youngest daughter and my
cousin. The tour would have been
cancelled for lack of sufficient paying customers but for Kanikaka’s intervention
with the tour conductor who happened to be his close friend. So the tour
happened and so did the closeness between Ujwal and me.

Not IAS,
FMC.
In 1956, I completed my B. Com. Course and enrolled for a Masters degree in
Public Economics by research in the RA Podar College in Matunga. Baba wanted me
to join the Indian Administrative Services. So, I sat for the test twice
passing the written component both times but flunking the interview. However, I
managed to pass in 1959 the Masters with an excellent report from my examiners
for my voluminous 654-page research tome and joined the Forward Markets
Commission, Government of India. In the meantime, Aai had decided that Ujwal
was the wife for her son – in the
face of serious and voluble opposition from her own daughter and the
down-with-the-Khetwadi-Mankars clique. She talked to Baba and he was more than
willing. So, in 1959, on Jesus Christ’s birthday, wedding rituals and reception
were held at the Laxmi Narayan Temple off Hughes Road.

Down in the
dumps.
After the uncalled-for interruption in my father’s successful career as a
criminal lawyer during his stint as Coroner of Bombay, his practice never
recovered to its previous level. (I got a personal glimpse in Baba’s courtroom
skills when he defended me in a traffic offence matter. It came about in this
fashion. In either 1953 or 1954, having just got my driving license, I was just
about a fledgling, somewhat hesitant driver. One morning, I was driving Baba to
the High Court at Flora Fountain before going to college. Baba was sitting next
to me and our chauffeur was in the back seat. Driving along New Queen’s Road,
now Parmanand Marg, just as the family Renault reached the Churchgate junction
and was about to take the then free left turn to go to Flora Fountain, there
was much shouting heard from the front seat of an unmarked Police vehicle
coming from Marine Drive and going our way. The alarm was apparently raised by
a top Police functionary – probably the Commissioner or Assistant Commission, I
never found out which – who made me pull the Renault to the left of the road
and took down all my particulars and confiscated my driving license. Our
explanation fell on deaf ears because he was thoroughly convinced that there
was no free left turn and that I had broken the law. He threatened to sue me
and did carry out the threat. When the case came for hearing, Baba really
demolished the officer who was put on the witness stand. The poor fellow was
aware of the existence of the free left turn and admitted as much to the Judge
who passed strictures about wasting the Court’s valuable time. So, it was
actually a walkover. And, it put paid to my life as a notorious law breaker –
and also to the free left turn at Churchgate!)

Baba’s
finances were in the doldrums by the time I had started earning a measly salary
not at all sizeable enough to bridge the yawning chasm that had opened up in
the family fortune. Baba used to also do all along a lot of pro bono work − at times even when it
was not called for, strictly speaking. He had made a lot of bad investments along
the way including a major one in a rundown property in a supposedly residential
compound in Vile Parle with a bunglow illegally used as first as a manufactory
of and later as a warehouse for medicinal products, a one-storey tenement and
three temporary structures. He had thought of it as a source of steady monthly
income in his old age. It turned out to be a quite a headache and a drain on
his already meagre resources. As a Trustee of Pathare Prabhu Charities, he
spent quite a bit of his time and, at several occasions, even money on
thankless honorary pursuits. (Perhaps, he saw it in terms of “giving back to
the society”. His valuable contribution was never sufficiently appreciated by
his community, though.) A chain smoker during most of his middle age, he had
quit cigarettes around the same time he turned vegetarian. Every Sunday,
though, a group of seven or eight of his bezique-playing friends gathered in
the terrace flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. Moreover, once a month, another
group – contract bridge players this time – assembled at the same address and
was lavishly entertained by the generous host. Baba was always mindful of the
comfort and well-being of his family. The 233 Khetwadi Main Road Mankars lived
well. We had a car even before I was born. (A maroon-and-black Wolseley Wasp it
was till around 1948, then making way for a red Renault that served the family
till the early sixties.) Also, we must have been among the first few families
in the Khetwadi precinct to own a pressure cooker, a top-of-the-line wireless
set and a refrigerator as early as the beginning of the 1950s. Baba also gladly
and willingly bought toys and books for me whenever I “wrote him a note” when
he left for work. The family (more often than not for the extended family) summered
in Matheran and Mahabaleshwar as a rule till almost the mid-fifties. Once, probably in 1941, the Mankars went as far south as Madras in the company of some members of the down-with-the-Mankars goon squad. (In retrospect,
I guess the Mankars were aping the goras who used to summer regularly at Simla, Darjeeling, Srinagar and “snooty Ooty”. I
distinctly remember travelling with several trunks and canvas bedrolls or
“beddings” which one doesn’t see any more on railways platforms or in the brake
vans.) Even these minor (and sometimes not so minor) but regular expenses, his
thoughtless handouts to all and sundry whiners and supplicants and money spent
on the maintenance of the aging family car and the chauffeur played havoc with
the Mankar Family’s cash cache. Things came to such a head that when my mother
was hospitalized for leukemia more than once in 1961-62, Baba had no other
option to tide over the financial crisis except to sell some of the family
jewelry.

Nine yards
of resolve.When Ujwal resumed her
college education at the Sophia immediately after her wedding, she scrupulously
followed the dress code for a newly married woman according to her mother-in-law’s
wishes. Her astonished and much amused classmates teased her for attending
college in a nine-yard saree and ornaments. Peer pressure was no match for her exemplary
resolve, though. She also patiently learned to cook Pathare Prabhu cuisine in
the special Mankar style. She wasn’t doing it to earn brownie points, by the
way. It was in her nature to behave in this fashion especially with people who
gave her love and respect as whole-heartedly as Aai and Baba did. So deeply
attached had she become to her mother-in-law that she looked after her almost
single-handedly throughout her last lingering illness waiting on her hand and
foot and attending to all her needs from bathing to feeding with an eagle eye
and an alert mind.

The fault lines begin to show.All throughout, Aai and Baba had been a devoted couple, as
far as my memory and “inside information” go. I remember them rising to each
other’s defence if a third part questioned either’s intentions, motives or
actions. If I said a cross word to Aai in his presence, Baba would chide me
gently in a pained tone of voice. Isn’t there a saying “Whom the gods would
destroy they first make mad”? Something similar happened to Aai at the fag end
of her life. She insisted that Baba should use his contacts to “shield” her
maternal nephew from the dire consequences of the serious misdemeanor he had
committed in his place of work. (Please see above.) As a leverage device, she
chose the weapon of silence. In other words, she stopped talking to Baba until
he was forced to oblige. Unfortunately, he chose to retaliate in like manner.
The Cold War was on. It ended with Aai’s death in the Bombay Hospital when only
Ujwal was with her and no one else from the close family.

During her last illness, Aai’s own
daughter had pleaded her inability to care for her ailing mother or at least
help in the process saying she had just delivered her second daughter who took
all her time. But this did not prevent her from hounding and harassing Ujwal
immediately after Aai’s death when she and her henchwomen, prominent among whom
were some members of the anti-Mankar clique, kept visiting her in the
afternoons on the pretext of supervising her progress during pregnancy. Once,
when Ujwal was alone at home in the afternoon with Baba and I out on work and
Ujwal’s trusted maid out on an errand, she demanded her share of the family
jewels from Ujwal. Ujwal quietly gave her the keys of the cupboard that her
father-in-law had recently handed over to her and watched as she plundered at
random some of the gold ornaments and silver stuff. The daughter of the house
even had the audacity to snatch away the Clyde bicycle that had been gifted to
her brother by one of Baba’s friend cum client, a certain Mr Kazarani. Ujwal
did not burden her father-in-law with the latest news because she did not want
to hurt him.

The last merry lap with two
grandsons. Baba survived Aai by a little under 3 years. In that short spell, he
enjoyed what Aai had hoped for but missed by a whisker as it were: playing with
the grandsons, singing ditties to them and spoiling them silly. He also made a
Last Will and Codicil dividing his property according to his wishes. That it
was challenged in the court of law after his death was inevitable. By whom and
at whose instigation are open secrets. The irony of it all was that when the
bunglow in Khar Baba had built with the sweat of his brow was snatched from him
by his own kith and kin, he did not see it fit to file a law suit. As soon as
he had left this world, his own kith and kin made sure history repeated itself.

Does every life story come with a
built-in moral? I don’t think I can answer the question. Did I learn anything
from the lives of my parents? Well, maybe all I relearned was the cliché that
bad things keep happening to good people. It’s, I suppose, all a manifestation
of what Buddha called samsara: the
human condition full of grief (dukkha)
and strife, frustration and pain, the result of “attachment, craving and the
refusal to accept impermanence”. Life happens in a circular continuum, I guess.
It reassures us that even this shall
pass. Reality shows on the idiot box and the assorted villains peopling them are
not a patch on reality shows and villains in real life, I dare say. At first
glance, every life looks like a lost cause. After a bit of thought, one begins
to feel not quite so cocksure.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Jeffrey Bernard is not everyone’s cup
of tea. Or, more appropriately in his case, peg of Smirnoff. I was pointed to
him by an erstwhile “friend of the family” who urged me to buy a copy of Low Life which, in case you didn’t know,
is a collection of Bernard’s weekly columns in The Spectator, circa the late eighties. After I had done
enjoying my mint-condition copy of Low
Life and gushing high praise for Bernard all over the place, the aforesaid
FOTF proceeded to “borrow” it promising prompt return thereof. I kept asking
him for it and he kept unleashing a torrent of excuses to hold me at bay. Not
only that. He kept borrowing more books from me – a notable one being Laura
Hillenbrand’s breathtakingly brilliant Seabiscuit
An American Legendhttp://bit.ly/1qlHT2i −and also borrowed my contacts to break into advertising. Funny
business, advertising. It willingly welcomes frauds and fakes and liars of
every ilk and description, even generously endowing them with success. But
unmasking faux friends is not the object of this post. Friends, Indians and
countrymen, we are here to bury old musty, smelly, contemptible memories and
praise Bernard fulsomely. All of which brings us to the “objects” hanging up
there in the headline of this post. Poor Jeffrey was in the habit of
discovering on the morning after unexpected foreign objects on his person. A
paper clip in his pubic hair. The remains of last night’s Chinese takeaway in
the pocket of his blazer. And, so on and so forth till the fat lady sings or
the cows come home. You get the general idea? He also was a fanatic about
overspending as well as adept at getting into trouble with the Internal Revenue
and VAT people − and that too during Mrs Thatcher’s regime. What’s more, he
excelled at backing the wrong horses ignoring his inner voice and marrying the
(only for him) wrong women. Also, he kept popping in and out of hospitals
whenever his body could stand the daily abuse no more and rebelled violently. All
through his troubles, though, he kept on plodding somehow to the winning post (if
you can call it that) dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (to
borrow an apt but all too frequently quoted turn of phrase from The Prince of
Denmark’s Nunnery Scene (Hamlet, Act
III, Scene I) and laughing his head off maniacally all the way to the Pay Out
window. Graham Greene once confessed that he had “never once been bored by
Jeffrey Bernard. If that is not high praise, then there’s John Osborne dubbing
him “the Tony Hancock of journalism”. For the life of me, I didn’t know Tony
Hancock from Adam until I googled the bloke. Then I found out that he was a popular
British comedian on radio and TV in the fifties and sixties. He was the guy who
said: “I don’t want any publicity − you get too many begging letters. If they’re
anything like the ones I send out, I don’t want to know!” That sounds very
Groucho-like. Meanwhile, excuse my ignorance. A man can’t be an encyclopedia
but now he can pretend to be one if he has a laptop and an Internet connection
or a smart phone. Bernard knew quite a bit about quite a few things, though.
How he found the time and energy to stay so well-informed after making his
presence felt at Coach and Horses, the renowned public house in Soho, twice a
day, occasional appearances at assorted race courses in Britain and elsewhere,
sponsored work-related jaunts abroad and partying several times a week in
addition to writing his weekly column for The
Spectator I shall never know. Apart from his self-deprecating sense of
humour – a typically British character trait even more archetypal than the
stiff upper lip of the British Raj, I reckon – whatever he wrote, often (I
suspect) in a vodka-induced daze, seemed to flow out of his electric typewriter
so utterly spontaneously, so effortlessly that I am envious every time I read
him. And, I seldom am that otherwise, mind you. Moreover, once good ol’ Bernard
turns berserkly bellicose as, for instance, when he is incensed at one of his
pet hates like “a nut called Andrea Dworkin”, he is in his elements. Nothing
short of total demolition would work for him. Meanwhile, having lost all hope
of owning a freshly minted copy of Low
Life, I was slowly sinking into a mire of depression until good ol’ Dadabhai
Naoroji Road (formerly Hornby Road) http://bit.ly/1nkeGZB
came to my rescue with bugles blowing and both guns blazing. One enchanted
afternoon in the late nineties, a copy of the sequel, More Low Life, in “good” condition lying half-hidden in a pile in
front of a pavement book vendor caught my eye. From then till now, I must have read
and re-read it at least half a dozen times. And, I have been doubly cautious
about whom I lend it to, even whom I boast about owing it to. You never know
whom to trust anymore. Meanwhile, the erstwhile FOTF has managed to extract a
sizeable bounty in kind out of Honourable Number Two Son (whom Charlie Chan
would have described as “expensively educated offspring”) before breaking off
all links with the Mankars. Well, well, c’est la vie! No kidding even with kids
around.

Wednesday, September 03, 2014

I
read The Wrap for entertainment news, Hollywood movies and TV stuff. Read and
forget – that’s my usual routine. But this Wrap rap http://bit.ly/Z6qPXa did catch my eye
instantly. There, we had Sharon Waxman, a former New York Times columnist,
waxing eloquently and flinging a provocative challenge at The New York Times: “Hey,
New York Times ‘Vows’ Section: Who Cares If ‘The Bride is Keeping Her Name'?” (For a moment, it made me think of the good ol’
“Hark, who goes there?” routine.) Her bone of contention is the venerable
newspaper making it a point to mention without fail in its Vows coverage that
all the brides were keeping their respective maiden surnames.

At
the height of the Feminist Movement, brides wore their maiden surnames as a
badge of honour, you’ll recall. Later on, it became a matter of unstated
routine, also a matter of convenience. Women started marrying later and later
in life. By then they had kind of got accustomed to their original moniker. Also,
career reasons as well as the long legal rigmarole involved in acquiring a new
name may prompt the refusal to disturb the status quo.

Waxman’s
target, though, seems to be the paper she worked for earlier. She points a finger
at their boast about being the first to report same-sex nuptials. She would
have preferred if her former employer had included significant details such as
a Caucasian woman marrying an Afro-American or human interest tidbits such as
the bride having lost 50 pounds of weight on her way to the church podium. And,
so forth.

This
is 2014. And, in the US of A, this issue is still being discussed. Will wonders
never cease to pop up?

Friday, August 29, 2014

This story about masculine hegemony is from the
seventies. It was told to me a while back by an erstwhile colleague from one of
the ad agencies I worked for in those days. He happens to be a friend I am in off-and-on
touch with even today. He was one of the two witnesses to the event.

Q: Why am I telling it now?

A: Because I came across it recently.

Q: Who does it concern?

A: One of my late (in every sense of the word) bosses
for whom I used to have and still have tremendous respect as an advertising
professional. He was highly regarded in the Indian and international Management
Studies circles as well, by the way.

Q: Can I vouch for the veracity of the “story”?

A: I can vouch for the credibility of the source.
Also, in the light of what I had heard on the workplace grapevine at that time
but discarded as idle gossip, probability dons the sinister cloak of
possibility. Moreover another friend with whom I have lost touch used to be a
frequent head office visitor to the Bombay office around the time the event
presumably took place and used to lodge at the boss’s apartment situated in a
tony locality of the city. He too had dropped hints in passing about the
dysfunctional family life with the head of the family always at loggerheads
with his wife but a doting father to his daughter who was schooling at an
upper-crust day school.

Q: So what is supposed to have happened, for Pete’s
sake?

A: The boss
used to travel a lot on work and also his teaching engagements. One evening,
the car picked him up at the airport and on its way back home took the Tulsi
Pipe Road (now Senapati Bapat Marg) route. This road runs parallel to the
Western Railway tracks. This was much before the three flyovers were built. All
along the road were makeshift hutments out of some of which hooch was sold and
flesh trade was plied. In other word, it was hardly the road on which to stroll
leisurely after sunset. As the Big Man’s car was speeding along the not too brightly
lit road, there suddenly flared up an altercation between the boss and the
missus who had gone to receive him at the airport. Things took such an ugly
turn after a while that the boss asked the chauffeur to stop the car and
ordered the missus to step out. She had no alternative but to obey. No sooner had
she stepped out of the car than the boss asked the chauffeur to start the car
and head home. As to how and when she managed to reach home, my informant had
no clue.

Q: So what’s the point of the tattletale-ing
excursion?

A: If you’re expecting an outburst dripping with angst
about clay-footed idols, perish the thought pronto. The only probable moral of
the story to my way of thinking right here and now is expressed eloquently by Shakespeare’s
famous words (Julius Caesar, Act III,
Scene ii, Line 190):

“O, what a fall was there,
my countrymen!

Then I, and you, and all
of us fell down…”

Though averse to joining in community breast-beating
and dirge-chanting, I shall make an exception in the present case and include
myself – purely for old time’s sake − in this group mourning the fall from
grace of a well-heeled, highly educated, cultured (or, gentrified?) Indian gentleman
holding a top well-paying job in a leading ad agency and residing in one of the
poshest pockets of Bombay (now Mumbai) because he behaved exactly like a
denizen of the shanties abutting the Tulsi Pipe Road once his male ego and
authority were challenged in the presence of witnesses. When the shanty dweller
drove his wife out of their hovel, she was still allowed to remain in a familiar
neighbourhood and could probably find a temporary refuge with a friendly
neighbour until things cooled down. The boss’s missus was abandoned in an unknown,
totally alien and most likely dangerous territory to fend for herself – a
situation straight out of a Hollywood noir
of the early fifties (Barbara Stanwyck and Richard Widmark, remember?). Good
grief, Charlie Brown! Can we not tell the Red Baron to fly his Sopwith Camel
real low and mow down such scum from the face of the earth?

False middle-class values. Don’t we all cling to them
even after half suspecting how very hollow they are just because they seem
congruent with the current benchmarks of belief and behaviour? They make us pose
like judges even in matters where we have no jurisdiction, so to speak.